What doesn’t kill you might not just make you stronger, but help you live longer too.
For aging and longevity expert Dr. Mark Hyman, stressing the body and brain is critical to lengthening health span—or the number of healthy years lived free of disease.
“One of the things that really helps us is adversity,” Hyman tells Fortune, adding that "a stress that doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
63-year-old Hyman, the founder and senior advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and author of Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life, has researched wellness practices and aging from an—ironically—young age. Before becoming a doctor, he taught yoga, interested in how to maintain healthy nutrition, exercise, and mindfulness.
While Hyman lives by his strength training regimen and nutritious diet, he also practices stressing the body—a lesser-known but equally essential feature of healthy aging.
“About 3,000 of our genes out of our 20,000 genes are focused on helping to keep us alive in adverse situations,” he says, noting people don’t often use them by choice. “We have our built-in regenerative renewal repair system. I call it the longevity switches, and they are activated by adversity.”
Hormesis is the body’s biological response to short, healthy stress. The process activates pathways that can benefit and slow the aging journey by “cleaning up old cells” and reducing inflammation, Hyman says. In short, the body builds resilience and short-term stress leads to longer-term strength.
Lucky for us, easy everyday hormesis-based activities are available.
Here are Hyman’s three most popular stress activities for a longer, healthier life:
1. Exercise
The next time you’re in the gym and feel the short-term stress of a HITT workout or weight-lifting session, remember hormesis. Exercise is a type of hormesis because it takes short-term pain to have a long-term gain biologically.
Beyond improving mental clarity and reducing the risk of heart disease more common with aging, exercise can help build the body’s resilience to aging. Any type of exercise, from a 30-minute power walk to a strength training session, can make a difference.
Hyman touts his 30-minute strength training routine, which includes body weight sessions and resistance bands for muscle strength, mobility, and balance; Research suggests resistance bands may reduce frailty in older adults.
Hyman also loves mountain biking as a form of exercise and says the key is finding something you enjoy and can do repeatedly. National guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity workouts and two days of strength training a week.